We’ve got a list of campus, actually. One of the Forest Service Historians has gone through and at least gotten a list of names.
Yeah it would be real interesting to find some of these people that were heroes, to get some information from them. Now I’ll get back to Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was kind of an arrogant son-of-a-bitch and pardons my words. He lived right across the street from us. How he decided to make some money was, see we required chains a good deal of the time with Annie Springs. We kept a truck down at Annie Spring with chains on it. It was a fairly light truck, only about a two, two and a half, three ton truck down there…we would load it up with gravel, and it had chains on it, and we could pull people across the hill. Because the road went up from the entrance station, it went up like this, went up and made a sharp curve and then went up to the top of the hill (16). And so, in going around there, people would get stuck quite frequently and we would go up and hook up and pull them up. You wouldn’t think of doing something like that now, but we did in those days. But anyway, if you came up there and we had snow on the road and it was one of those days that we did require chains to go up to the rim, why there would be people come up from Klamath Falls. The sun might be shining down there and the sun might be shining up here, but still, if it was right after the storm you had packed snow on the road, and you had to have chains on. It wasn’t that you couldn’t make it, but you were worried about what someone else was going to do. So we required chains and the guy would say, “Well, Fitzgerald got a hold of several sets of chains, some of them which he got out of the winter house down here and he had them hanging at the entrance station. And he said, “Well gosh, we just happen to have a set here and we usually get a dollar out of them but if you want them, why you can got put them on, why, I’ll help you put them on.” He wanted to help put them on and off they’d go up to the Rom and they’d come back they’d give him back his chains and he made a dollar. He made enough money out of chains down there on government time and government chains to buy himself a movie camera and a screen. And he told me this. So, I’m not guessing at this part of it.
Course in the wintertime the Lodge completely closed up and they kept a caretaker up on about the third floor, I guess is where it was. I can’t remember were it was, I think it was on the third floor apartment that the caretaker stayed in. He was an old fella; this was in the last two years ’48-’49, ’49-’50. I don’t remember who did it the time before. His name was Ole and I don’t know what the rest of his name was. He was deaf at that window there. Fitzgerald got on the right side of him and Fitzgerald carted off steaks and roasts and turkeys and this kind of stuff and they ended up in his deep freeze down at Annie Springs. So he didn’t have to buy much food. Now if I sound bitter, I am not bitter anymore. I was bitter at the time. And it wasn’t because we weren’t getting it, but because it was just plain, wasn’t right. And very frankly in the era of about early’48, I would have gone to the Forest Service. I would have quite here and gone to the Forest Service if I had a forestry degree. I just about had it.
